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American Federationist.

VOL. VI.

DEVOTED TO THE INTERESTS AND VOICING THE DEMANDS
OF THE TRADE UNION MOVEMENT.

WASHINGTON, D. C., AUGUST, 1899.

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There shall come from out this noise of strife and groaning,
A broader and a juster brotherhood;

A deep equality of aim, postponing
All selfish seeking to the general good.

There shall come a time when each shall to another
Be as Christ would have him, brother unto brother.
There shall come a time when brotherhood grows stronger
Than the narrow bounds which now distract the world;
When the cannons roar and the trumpets blare no longer,
And the ironclad rusts and the battle flags are furled;
When the bars of creed and speech and race, which sever,
Shall be fused in one humanity forever.

LEWIS MORRIS.

Rights-Human and Divine.

BY SAM L. LEFFINGWELL.

Of all the rights prompted by the power of reason no one is more indisputable or ineffaceable than the right to think. Thought is the basic seat of all reason and begins down within the primitive soul. It starts in feeling, and grows up into a moveless pyramid.

No man can be a prince, save in his power of reason; fail in that, he is worse than horse or dog or beast of wilderness.

A man may be halting between several faiths, and it is only by the use of reason that he can find the true one, and by comparison learn to choose.

While thought precedes the will to think, error lives ere reason can be born. Reason is the power to guess at right or wrong. It is the twinkling light of wandering life, "fooling the follower betwixt shade and shining."

In the light of reason-inherent in the right of thought-the equality of all natural rights implants its stamp as firm and ineffaceable as thought itself. There can be no such thing as preferment in creative nature. It would be destructive of the divine theory itself to attribute one living human creature as being possessed of more of natural rights than another one. Difference in organism, in location, in environment, may produce a diversity of race or people; may endow some more than others with reasoning faculties and the power better to improve and sustain their conditions;

No. 6

but in the dispensation of natural rights, it is totally and absolutely against reason and common sense, to assume that birth or station establishes superior power or force by the will of a creative agent that necessarily has no choice in the selection, and is neither benefited nor deprived of any results that may accrue, good or evil.

The whole system of monarchial or kingly rule is founded upon a theory as baseless and unstable as it is fallacious and deceptive. To assume, even, that a king, or an emperor, or a ruler of any character, is placed thus by divine authority, is contrary to all sense of enlightened reason; is to question the judgment and wisdom of divine authority itself.

Divine right has no recognition outside of or beyond the advocates of despotism. It has no standard of claim; can give no record of its lineage; can point to no incident where it had a birth or beginning. It can point to no miracle or other incontestable evidence of its title; nor has its close imitation and brazen assumption in the claim of paternal authority. Both are absurd in the extreme and might be unworthy of notice, if they were not often given great weight by distinguished and able writers on the subject of government.

The doctrine of divine or paternal rights which still prevails in some portions of the world as foundation for claim, in anyone, to the sovereign power of the State, is growing more preposterous and ridiculous with each succeeding year's enlightenment of the masses of the world's peoples. It belonged to the dark ages and was characteristic of the superstition and idolatry which then prevailed. All men by nature were created equally free; and the inequalities which have grown up among them and the governments which have been established over them, have evolved and proceeded from causes by which their natural rights have been subverted.

While those who have witnessed and are yearly witnessing the gradual but certain decline of this assumption to government by the power of inherent right—a right which is being realized only as of brute force-an impending redemption from the ills of tyrrany which have in the past ages burdened and oppressed the world's peoples-it is well for all to fit themselves for contention against similar though none the less burdensome evils

which may grow out of other sources. Monopoly of power to govern a people, to their detriment, if not to their absolute enslavement, is none the less favorable to the exercise of natural rights, than the monopoly of the money power, as evidenced in the large aggregations of capital and the suppression and ultimate destruction of all smaller enterprises; stifling and obliterating all efforts of the weak as against the strong. The age of enlightenment to which we have progressed absolves this class of savage monsters from claiming authority for brutality upon such flimsy title as of "divine right." It makes no claim at all. It only stands up with a club-"I am bigger and stronger than you are. Do as I direct, or I will flatten you into helplessness-into nothingness. Rights? Rights? You have no rights that I am bound to respect. I recognize only one right— might!"

It is the same old song: "Force against reason and right."

The wage-workers of America look with pride as of a government with "equal rights for allspecial privileges for none." Have we equal rights? Have there not been special privileges— many of them-granted to the few as against the many? When a wage-worker is forced to the presence of any branch of the Federal court, does he find his rights equal, or is he forced to give way, and fall back subdued, to the special privileges of the few, whose wealth and influence bring them nearer to the throne?

When he is crushed down and trampled upon by some heartless corporation and utters cry for an equality of rights, does he obtain it, or is he met with the strong arm of military force to subdue him and establish the special privileges of the few who oppress him body and soul?

When he bargains for a house, or a wagon, or a suit of clothes, or a pair of shoes, does he fix the price, or does the seller decide what it will cost to pay for the article in question? The question of right is here undisputable. He has the right to buy, if he is able and the price suits him. The party who has the finished article is the owner thereof and has the right to fix the price. Now, by what change of logic, reason or right, does it come about that when the wage-worker is called upon to perform a piece of labor for the production of any one of these finished articles, although he is the owner, the seller, of his labor, he is not considered even in the line of raw material, and the buyer insists upon the right to fix the price for which he will purchase. This is certainly a crushing-out of an equality of rights and the establishment of special privileges to the few who are able to buy.

It is so and has been so for ages. Is it the strong against the weak? Will it always be so? Will labor always linger under the sleepy ignorance of its own strength, and fall back, again and again, be

fore the veiled hand of threatening force, or will it open its eyes to the situation; shake off the shackles of subduing lethargy and attest its prerogative to nothing less than equality of rights vouchsafed ince the world began?

There is only one place where the wage-worker makes pretension to the use of equal rights. That is, in the ballot. In this proud exercise of the franchise he stands the peer of his fellows; his equality of right here is unquestioned; and, if he has sense enough, untrammeled. How does he enjoy this privilege? Does he exercise proper judgment and discretion? It matters not what his partisan precepts and affiliations may be, he is still untrammeled, from the point of sense, reason and logic, in the full exercise of his thought and will. Does he do justice to himself and his dependencies in his expression? If he is helpless, and fails in effort to relieve his weakness, by giving expression at this, his best, his only opportunity, he robs himself of his own good name, without which he is poor indeed.

No, my friends, the divine authority of a ruler is a myth. It is divine to do right. It is divine to contend for equal rights for all; and no right has more claims to divine authority than the right to labor and the right to demand an equality of profit from labor performed.

British Labor Notes. By THOMAS REECE.

LONDON, July 6, 1899. Plymouth, on the south coast is to be the scene of this years' Trade Union Congress. It will be the thirty-second of the series that were instituted in 1868. In that year 34 delegates representing 18 trade unions and 11 trades councils, foregathered at Manchester. Between then and the convention of last September, there is considerable development and expansion. At Bristol last year 406 delegates assembled, and represented 188 trade societies. The trades councils have not been allowed to send delegates since 1895, as they represent trade unions which obtain direct representation. Such duplication of representatives led to an overcrowding of the congress until it became necessary to apply the pruning scissors.

Usually the President of the Congress is the trade unionist who occupies the post of president of the trades council of the city where the convention meets. The trades council of Plymouth was founded in 1890, and represents a dozen unions operating within the district, with about sixteen hundred members. Halifax in Yorkshire with about the same population has 36 local unions with 4,500 members affiliated with its trades council. The purpose of quoting the contrast is to give some idea of the backward condition of trade unionism in the south of England. Plymouth is a maritime port and naval dockyard with a population of 87,000.

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